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Tips for Teaching Your Toddler Spanish at Home

Tips for Teaching Your Toddler Spanish at Home

Preschool students across the country are getting an education at-home either through homeschooling or virtual learning due to COVID-19. However, even if you’re fluent in Spanish, teaching toddlers the language can be difficult for first-time instructors. These tips for teaching your toddler Spanish at home will ensure they get the education they need, even if they’re not in a normal preschool learning environment.

Prepare Enough Activities

Teaching preschoolers isn’t like teaching high schoolers or even middle schoolers. Instead of giving them worksheets to fill out, you’ll need a variety of educational activities to swap from every ten minutes or less. Whether it’s a vocabulary card game, a Spanish music sing-along, a coloring activity, or another fun form of edutainment, plan enough of them ahead of time so you can switch from one to the next while keeping your toddler’s energy high. While this might seem discombobulating to older students, maintaining that toddler’s energy and attention is what makes short educational activities so effective in the classroom and at home.

Plan Lessons According To Progress

Don’t worry—you don’t need to plan an hour or two of activities for every lesson. When you’re planning out those activities for the day’s lesson, it’s a good idea to keep the lesson between 10 to 30 minutes in length. The younger the student, the shorter the lessons should be at first. That said, feel free to adjust that timeframe depending on how fast your toddler is learning the language. Starting out with shorter lessons will help ease toddlers into the subject instead of overwhelming them with new information right out of the gate.

Read Bilingual Children’s Books

Children’s books are a great tool for expanding a toddler’s imagination and knowledge. There is a charming selection of bilingual children’s books that will help you teach important lessons such as numbers, names, colors, animals, and food.

Make sure to pick books with colorful, vibrant imagery, as having the ability to match a word with a corresponding image will help immensely with your toddler’s education. While these books are frequently used in classrooms, you can easily obtain them for homeschooling through services such as Amazon without breaking the bank. Aside from vocabulary words, bilingual children’s books also allow you to teach your child proper sentence structure as well as Spanish history and culture.

First-time homeschooling isn’t always easy. Thankfully, these tips for teaching your toddler Spanish at home should help both you and your child adjust to this new classroom arrangement. It might feel strange at first; however, once you go through a lesson or two, you’ll find your groove. It’ll become even more fulfilling once you see your child beginning to successfully use what you’re teaching them outside of the classroom.

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